Product/Audience Match Strategy
Part of Final Marketing Yourself Plan
Assignment Formatting
Length of assignment is approximately 3-4 pages. Document should use Times New Roman 12-point font with margins not exceeding 1-inch. Assignments should be completed and submitted before due date/times. Late penalty is 10% deduction per day (or partial day) late. No plagiarism, copying or cheating.
Instructions:
As explained in the PDF reading Matching the Product with the Audience When Marketing Yourself, its critical to understand your product (i.e., your skills, attributes, personality, core values, etc.) and to determine and understand your target audiences (i.e., potential employers, colleagues, customers, career gatekeepers, etc.). For this assignment, youll work to outline your potential target audiences, determine what those audiences desire, and then decide how youll match your product with your target audiences. Using either a paragraph, outline, or table format, do the following:
1. List Current Audiences. List various audiences (at least 8) to whom you currently market yourself on a daily, weekly, or other periodic basis. These might include potential employers, current employers, friends, family, teachers, various societal segments, social groups, customers, colleagues, employees, store personnel, vendors/suppliers, social media audiences, etc. Dont forget that these audiences might be face-to-face, online, over the phone, etc. For each audience, be extremely specific as to who this audience is. Dont just say store employees when you can say the early morning employees at the Starbucks that I go to every weekday. Dont just say my coworkers when you can say my co-workers Cristina, Derek, and Victoria who work in the cubicles next to mine.
2. Importance of Current Audiences. For each of the 8+ current audiences, provide some insights as to why each particular audience might be important to you in your marketing yourself efforts. How can impressing each audience help you?
3. What Current Audiences Want From You. Finally, for each of the 8+ current audiences you listed, write down at least three characteristics (features, attributes, skills, traits, values, etc.) that they would desire in a person such as you. Although there may be some similar traits or characteristics across the audiences you listed, each audience likely will desire some unique characteristics as well.
4. List Prospective Audiences. Your next step is to add at least three new prospective target audiences to whom you would like to market yourself in the near or distant future. Again, they can be potential employers in a particular industry, friends, social groups, customers, fans, readers, etc. While its good to be specific as to the industry, type of people, etc., you dont have to be as specific as you were in Step 1 because you may not know the details of these audiences yet.
5. Importance of Prospective Audiences. As you did in Step 2 with your current audiences, for each of the 3+ prospective audiences, provide some insights as to why each particular audience might be important to you in your future marketing yourself efforts. How can impressing each audience help you? 6. What Prospective Audiences Want From You. For each of the 3+ prospective target audiences, write down at least three characteristics (features, attributes, skills, traits, values, etc.) that they would desire in a person such as you. Because you may not really know these audiences very well, you may end up estimating this section more than the other ones. Nevertheless, consider what characteristics would be important to each audience.
7. Product/Audience Match. Now consider how well youre matching your Product You with the desired attributes of the (at least 8) current audiences and the (at least 3) prospective audiences that you listed. Discuss the matches as well as the discrepancies (the instancesin which you dont match).
8. Changing Product You. Discuss what you can do to have a better match between your various target audiences and the product (set of attributes, traits, etc.) that youre offering. How can you change your Product You as well as your Personal/Professional Brand to better market yourself to these various audiences?
This section consists of a set of self-improvement recommendations.
Assignment Sections
1. Cover Page: Name, Panther ID, Major, Minor, Certificate(s), Assignment Title
2. Introduction: Discuss the purpose for a Product/Audience Match.
3. Product/Audience Match Analysis: This is where youll put the analysis from the eight steps above.
4. Synthesis and Summary: Discuss what you learned from this exercise. What did you learn about target marketing? What did you learn about your own audiences? What did you learn about yourself? Synthesize your learning from the various parts of the assignment and create a summary that you can review in the future.
Assignment Formatting
Document should use Times New Roman 12-point font with margins not exceeding 1-inch. Length of assignment is approximately 2-4 pages. Assignments should be completed and submitted before due date/times. Late penalty is 10% deduction per day (or partial day) late. No plagiarism, copying or cheating.
